1981 saw the final round of Salyut 6 visits. Towards the end, the space station was docked with another, similar sized, 20 tonne spacecraft - Cosmos 1267. It arrived and docked just over a month after the last cosmonauts departed, having been in orbit for two months in its own right. It was one of a series of large, manoeuvrable spacecraft, some of which (Cosmos 1267 included) were equipped with a crew cabin capable of returning to Earth. None, however, carried cosmonauts.

These were the 'TKS' spacraft from the Chelomei Design Bureau that had originally been intended to operate with the 'Almaz' type space stations. When the Almaz programme was cancelled, some of the TKS vehicles were re-routed in the the Korolyov Bureaus's DOS programme.

Cosmos 1267 remained with Salyut 6 until the end, just over a year after the departure of the last crew. Mid-1982, the combination spacecraft was guided to a destructive re-entry over the southern Pacific Ocean to avoid the possibility of it re-entering naturally and hitting an inhabited part of the Earth.